Get well, Adele

In his last months as prime minister, Gordon Brown sat down and wrote a fan letter to a young British singer-songwriter. ‘With the troubles that the country’s in financially,’ he told her, ‘you are a light at the end of the tunnel.’ Last weekend that light officially went out: Adele has suffered a career-threatening vocal cord injury and will not sing again this year. OK, so it’s impossible to prove cause and effect, but you have to wonder if the curse of Gordon Brown has struck again.

To understand what bad news this is, remember that it’s barely three months since the death of Amy Winehouse. Now Britain may be about to lose a second surreally gifted musician with big hair and pipe-cleaner-length eyelashes. At 23, Adele has already beaten Madonna’s record for the longest stint by a woman at the top of the British album chart. She is the first artist since the Beatles to have had two top five singles and two top five albums at the same time. And her latest recording, 21, is the first to sell three million copies in a calendar year. But to appreciate Adele you have to take your nose out of the Guinness World Records and hear her voice. It’s difficult to describe the sound without booking a place in Pseuds’ Corner, but let’s just say that the comparisons with Etta James and Ella Fitzgerald aren’t far-fetched. (If you don’t believe me, watch her on YouTube singing ‘Someone Like You’, the last track on 21, live in her home.)

Her voice is all the more beautiful because it comes from a hard place. Born in Tottenham to an 18-year-old single mum, Adele Laurie Blue Adkins had a hardscrabble childhood. She idolised the singer Gabrielle so much that one day she wore a sequinned eyepatch to school (not a great idea in her part of London).